Sir Ian Taylor

Plenty of people who watch cricket have seen Sir Ian Taylor’s work without ever knowing his name. The ball-tracking graphic that settles an lbw review, the on-screen lines that turn a yacht race into something a casual viewer can actually follow: a lot of that came out of a company in Dunedin, run by a man who started his working life as a children’s television presenter.

From Raupunga to the Small Screen

Taylor was born in Kaeo around 1949 and grew up in Raupunga, of Ngāti Kahungunu and Ngāpuhi descent, with a Māori mother and a Pākehā father. He was sent to a Catholic boarding school in Masterton and went on to take a law degree at the University of Otago, an unlikely start for a man who would make his name in graphics and television. Before any of that he had fronted a 1960s band, The Kal-Q-Lated Risk, and it was performing, not law, that pointed the way.

His first public life was on screen, presenting for TVNZ on programmes like Play School and Spot On, and later New Zealand’s Funniest Home Videos. It gave him the instinct that has shaped everything since: the job is not the data, it is the story the data tells.

From Screen to Software

In 1989 Taylor set up Taylormade Media to make television programmes, and a year later, in 1990, he founded Animation Research Limited in Dunedin. It grew into one of the country’s leading computer animation companies, known internationally for its sports graphics as much as its advertising work. Its Virtual Eye product became the tool that brought ball-tracking to cricket’s Decision Review System, watched by television audiences the world over, and its graphics have helped viewers read the America’s Cup, golf and sailing. In 2014 the team shared a Sports Emmy for its America’s Cup mobile app, a rare result for a business run out of the lower South Island rather than a global broadcast hub.

A Different Kind of Tech Story

Taylor’s career cuts against the usual New Zealand tech story. He built a globally recognised business without leaving Dunedin, and he now ranks among the most famous entrepreneurs New Zealand has produced. He has been open about doing it as a Māori entrepreneur, something the sector acknowledged when he was named Outstanding Māori Business Leader of the Year in 2013. He has used his profile to argue that young New Zealanders, and rangatahi in particular, should see technology as a place they belong.

The Self-Isolation Trial

Taylor became a national figure of a different kind during the pandemic. In late 2021, with managed isolation places scarce and businesses cut off from the world, he won government approval to run a privately funded self-isolation trial, flying to the United States for work and returning to isolate at home under a geo-fenced monitoring system rather than taking up an MIQ room. He ran it as a proof of concept and had it independently reported on, and it made him one of the most visible business voices in the debate over how New Zealand should reopen.

Recognition

The honours have followed the work. He was inducted into the New Zealand Technology Hall of Fame in 2009, named North & South’s New Zealander of the Year in 2010, and made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2012 for services to television and business. He was named Innovator of the Year at the 2019 New Zealander of the Year Awards, and in 2021 he was knighted, promoted to Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to broadcasting, business and the community. In 2022 the University of Otago, where he had taken his law degree, awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Commerce.

What makes Sir Ian Taylor worth paying attention to is not any single award. It is the through-line. Whether he was in front of a Play School camera or building the graphics that decide a Test match, the aim stayed the same: take something complicated and make it make sense to an ordinary person watching at home. That is a rarer skill in business than it sounds.